ANTH245 2007-10-01

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Business

• The Midterm is available on Blackboard
• Please send in your responses on time

Recap

• What is Coding?
• The process of converting texts into codes
  • A kind of transduction
  • A kind of reductionism
  • informal → formal
• A : B :: Text : Code :: Discourse : Ontology
• The reduction of A to B is structuralism

Segue

• Structuralism = Cognitive Science
• Just as information culture represents text as code, CogSci represents activity as plan
• Activity = ritual, work, practice = parole, event

Intro

• We are now officially turning the tables -- from "culture as information" to "information as culture"
• We will explore continuities and discontinuities between the two approaches
• Path:
  1. Computer as metaphor
  2. Computer as tool
  3. Computer as artifact
  4. Next week: Expanding the scope

Suchman 1983

Background

• Description of Lucy Suchman
• One of the pioneers of "corporate anthropology," but from a critical perspective
• Sets the method:
  1. Office as ethnographic site -- "village"
  2. Computer as core artifact -- the "churinga"
  3. Work as ritual
  4. What are the symbols and myths?
     • discourse, planning tools, documents
     • Management and Labor

Procedures

• What is the problem? The status of formal procedures.
  • The "natives" view procedures as a description of work
  • But the anthropologist sees things otherwise
  • Note that here the denial of the native point of view does not strike as ethically problematic (as it did with Rappaport)

Suchman 1988, part 1

• The planning model in AI
• Plans as reality
• But plans can't explain action
• Consciousness and unconsciousness
• Reversal

Suchman 1988, part 2

• Whiteboard as "cultural model" (Colby)

Forsythe 1993

• Knowledge engineering
• Representation of work
• Compare to coding